Higher Education Bubble note

Every now and then we should stop and think about the context of higher education that we mostly hope most of our kids are headed for.... the New York Federal Reserve has come out (November 27, 2012) with a Q3 household financials report, Decrease in Overall Debt Balance Continues Despite Rise in Non-Real Estate Debt - Federal Reserve Bank of New York

in the third quarter, non-real estate household debt jumped 2.3 percent to $2.7 trillion. The increase was due to a boost in student loans ($42 billion), auto loans ($18 billion) and credit card balances ($2 billion). ...The reduction in overall debt is attributed to a decrease in mortgage debt ... and home equity lines of credit...
Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter. ... $23 billion is new debt ... the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter.²...
² these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle. This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high.

These debts, of course, are not discharged in bankruptcy. It's a profoundly immoral system in which our almost-adults are urged to jump into heavy debt with no serious consideration of their long-run finances, and no way out at all. The very useful ZeroHedge finance site emphasizes "The Scariest Graph of the Quarter," being the student-loan line from

A slow multi-year rise to 9%, back to 8.5%, and now a sudden jump to 11% where the new delinquency measure is known to underestimate the real problem quite drastically. So it's worse than that, even though the other loan types are not doing anything of the kind. Looking for something positive to say, we can see this as one source of pressure for online education technology at the college and graduate level; that technology, whether from Coursera or MITx or Western Governors or ...., then becomes available at the KhanAcademy level.
Or then again, maybe not.

Star Academies?

"Welcome to Star Scholar U, where professors are the credential".
Professors deliver self-service online courses | The Daily Caller

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely—they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Rheingold U is new to me:

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include...

I dunno. The idea of the star as teacher is at least partly a matter of student incentives...of generated focus. Maybe we can have an actual profession which is "course designer", and an actual profession of course certification/evaluation, and a star lecturer can do the actual mini-lecture deliveries...how about real stars? Patrick Stewart as a physics lecturer? Does it really matter if he understands what he's saying? (Taylor Swift as a psychology lecturer?) Extend the mini-lectures with mini-dialogues, in which an actor/student takes a role with which the actual student can identify -- in fact each mini-lecture becomes multiple online mini-dialogues, so you can follow along with the education of the fictional character you most identify with, interacting with, well, with the
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
Or then again, maybe not, except in Neverland.

Flipping flops for some?

At the undergraduate level, the Khan-Academy style flipped classroom (extremely loosely defined as "watch videos alone, then come to class to do problems") gets skeptical comments and comments on the comments at I’ll flip something § Unqualified Offerings

I have several colleagues who are doing the flipped classroom this year and it’s bombing. Basically, they say it’s working great for motivated students who love going at their own pace with online “modules” and are happy to do problems in class. But, anything will work for motivated students.
For most of the lot, they say, it’s a failure because they come to these problem sessions (what used to be lectures) and they haven’t read the material and now you have to sort-of teach them in digest form on the fly if their time is not to be completely wasted. So yes, I am unimpressed with the flipped classroom.

This kind of thing obviously wants watching; I would like to know what sort of videos are in use here. It sounds like this might be simply institutionalized one-hour talking-head lectures made available to students on the web. If so, I would expect such failures...but if the results apply to actual Khan-Academy style small segments in Khan's own "don't see me, see what I'm seeing" style, with questions to answer before passing to the next segment, then there's at least a potential Big Problem. And of course this is possible. And if there's a Big Problem, it may or may not have a solution (are your online answers part of your grade? Do you need to check in to a scheduled lab to do your online work? etc. Khan's own belief, at the lower level where he's working, seems to be that scheduled labs, total maybe 20% of the day, are about right. But that's not the way some schools are trying it. Hmm.)
I dunno.

Higher EdX gets Bigger...Texas Size

It's higher education, but the more MOOC (massive online etc) technology grows at the upper level, the more available it will be at all levels. Anyway, Texas is in; U. of Texas Plans to Join edX | Inside Higher Ed

The University of Texas is planning today to officially join edX, which offers massive open online courses or MOOCs. Because the Texas announcement involves an entire system, it represents a major expansion of edX, which was founded by two universities (Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and was later joined by one other (the University of California at Berkeley). Coursera, another major MOOC provider, has been adding universities at a rapid pace. The Texas system plans to focus on general education and introductory-level courses for its MOOC offerings. Bloomberg reported that the University of Texas is paying $5 million to join edX.

So we link to EdX and incidentally to Coursera and we say: Faster please, this is good.
Or then again, maybe not.

AP classes: Good or Bad?

I took a bunch of AP classes in high school, in the late 60s, but never took the exams because they were sent surface mail (to Colombia) and arrived after the required date. My kids have taken AP classes...I've never thought much about it. Today's online Atlantic has AP Classes Are a Scam - John Tierney - The Atlantic

My beef with AP courses isn't novel. The program has a bountiful supply of critics, many of them in the popular press (see here and here), and many increasingly coming from academia as well (see here). The criticisms comport, in every particular, with my own experience of having taught an AP American Government and Politics course for ten years.... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification -- a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.

I don't know how much of that I believe, but it could be important.
Or then again, maybe not.

Marginal Revolution University

My favorite economics bloggers, being professors, have started a Khan-Academy-style online university with one course -- Development Economics; soon to grow. A Blog Hopes Its New Online Course Will Be More Than Marginal | The New Republic

one of Cowen’s many, many driving questions: what is education really for—what really makes it valuable? Mainstream economic thinking, Cowen noted in a lengthy 2006 blog post that foreshadowed MRU, views education primarily as a signaling device....
But Cowen posited that education is most efficiently used as a tool for self-improvement in the broadest sense. “Education is about self-acculturation,” he wrote, continuing:

education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.

MRU is ultimately aiming for a better actual education, not a better means of signaling. ... “You can think of this,” Cowen says, laughing for the only time during our phone conversation and only lightly, “as a marginal attempt—a marginal revolution, so to speak—to get education to be more about learning.”
...a professor from the University of Oklahoma will lead a course on Mexico early next year—and Cowen is encouraging readers/viewers to make their own videos and send them in, with Tabarrok citing Wikipedia as MRU’s model here. Its optimistic motto is “Learn, Teach, Share.” This ad hoc philosophy is central to MRU’s method—and is potentially its greatest weakness.

As long as they're providing a resource for self-education and a resource for teachers in classrooms, that should work. If they need to evaluate students, I presume they'll have to develop some kind of peer grading; I've been thinking about networks of Google hangouts for that purpose. (You get assigned to a series of Google hangouts, working with different people and validating each other's actual existence...that it's actually you taking that test, for one thing.
Or then again, maybe not.